“You keepin’ people in here?” Bathsheba shook her head. “Don’t reckon so. Ain’t nobody in the whole wide world could keep people in a place like this. What you’re doin’ is, you’re keepin’ niggers here. Niggers ain’t people, not to the folks who go ’round yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ all the damn time.”
“Mama…” Antoinette said.
Bathsheba laughed. “It’s the truth, ain’t it? ’Course it is. You afraid I git in trouble on account of tellin’ the truth? Girl, how kin I git in trouble that’s any worse’n what I’m in already? You answer me that.” She turned to Rodriguez. “You answer me that, too, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.”
Rodriguez had no answers, and he knew it. He was a twenty-year Freedom Party man. He’d shouted, “Freedom!” and “?Libertad!” plenty of times, more times than he could count. He had no use for blacks; if anything, mallate was even more insulting, even more demeaning, than nigger. He still believed Negroes caused most of the Confederacy’s troubles. And without blacks, whites would come down on Mexicans instead.
But this skinny old woman did something no one else had ever been able to do: she made him ashamed of the uniform he wore, of the stripes on his sleeve, of the Party badge on his chest. Bathsheba did indeed tell the truth, and Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t too far gone to know it.
“Where you goin’?” she called after him. He didn’t answer. He just went away, anywhere away from the terrible truth, as fast as his legs would take him.
“Now look what you went and done, Mama,” Antoinette said reproachfully, as if, despite everything that had happened to them, this could still be her mother’s fault.
“Me? I didn’t do nothin’,” Bathsheba answered, and then, more quietly but not too quietly for Rodriguez to hear, “He done it to hisself.”
And there was another piercingly painful truth. Rodriguez had done it to himself. He looked beneath the face of population reduction and saw murder. He looked at niggers, at mallates, and saw people. He looked at what he’d been doing and saw…
“Madre de Dios,” he whispered, and crossed himself. “?Ai, madre de Dios!” But could even the Virgin forgive him for such a mountain of sins? He had trouble believing it. No-he couldn’t believe it. That made a difference. That made all the difference in the world.
He crossed himself again. The gesture seemed extraordinarily pointless, extraordinarily futile. He was damned. He felt the certainty of his damnation like that mountain of sin falling on him.
He’d known for a long time that Edith Pinkard’s first husband was a camp guard who killed himself. He’d heard of other men who did the same thing. Up till now, he’d thought they were crazy. All at once, he didn’t. How could you live with yourself when you understood what you were doing, what you were helping your country do?
He looked down at his hands. How much blood was on them? A river? A lake? An ocean? He looked at the submachine gun in those bloodstained hands. It was made for one thing: killing people. It was perfectly designed for the job, too. He clicked off the safety, flicked the change lever to full automatic fire. Then, like a man in a trance, he put the muzzle of the conveniently short weapon in his mouth. It smelled and tasted of metal and gun oil.
“Look out!” a woman cried. “He gonna-”
And he did. He pulled the trigger, hard. And that was most definitely that.
Chester Martin had never gone south of the Ohio River. He’d spend the Great War in Virginia, on the Roanoke front in the west and then, after recovering from his first wound, in the northern part of the state, pushing down toward Richmond. He’d been not far from Fredericksburg when the fighting ended in 1917-and not far from the same town when he got wounded twenty-five years later.
He liked Kentucky better. He especially liked how far the U.S. Army had driven into Kentucky, and how fast it was moving. They’d passed Madisonville and were heading south toward Earlington. Madisonville was a tobacco town. The crop was nowhere near ripe, which didn’t stop several U.S. soldiers from plucking their own, drying or half cooking the leaves, and trying to smoke them afterwards. They proved one thing in a hurry: making cigarettes wasn’t as easy as it looked.
Earlington, by contrast, made its living from coal. U.S. Army engineers dynamited the entrances to one mine after another. “Is that smart, sir?” Martin asked his platoon commander. “Shouldn’t we be using those mines ourselves?” He knew how much coal the steel industry needed, and it wasn’t the only one.
Lieutenant Wheat only shrugged. “I guess the first thing is to deny this coal to the enemy,” he answered. “We can worry about everything else later. It’s not like we don’t mine plenty of our own.”
“I suppose so, sir.” If Chester didn’t sound convinced, it was because he wasn’t. But he didn’t decide such things, even if the news would have come as a surprise to the men in the platoon.
Somewhere not far away, a rifle went off. He and Lieutenant Wheat both reached for their weapons-that wasn’t a Springfield. It also wasn’t one of the Confederates’ automatic rifles, or an older bolt-action Tredegar. Martin didn’t know exactly what it was-some kind of squirrel gun, he supposed. He would have bet whoever squeezed the trigger wasn’t aiming at a squirrel.
The same thought must have gone through Delbert Wheat’s mind, for he said, “They don’t love us around here, do they?”
“Not hardly,” Chester said. The.22 or whatever it was barked again. “I bet we’re going to have to take more hostages.” Soldiers in butternut were trying to hold a line on the southern fringes of Earlington, and they would have to fall back from there in the next day or two. But Confederate civilians had rediscovered the thrills of guerrilla warfare. Kids and old men and even women turned into bushwhackers whenever they saw the chance.
The laws of war said people who weren’t in uniform but took up arms anyway were fair game. Those laws didn’t say taking hostages was all right, but every army on enemy territory did it. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just made more civilians want to pick up squirrel guns.
“We kill enough of these fuckers, sooner or later the rest will get the idea,” Wheat said. “Or if they don’t, we’ll kill all of them.” He didn’t sound worried-more as if he looked forward to it.
After a third shot rang out, Martin got to his feet. “Somebody ought to do something about that damn sniper,” he said.
He hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a U.S. machine gun stuttered out a short burst, and then another one. A triumphant shout went up: “Got the son of a bitch!”
“Talk about service,” Lieutenant Wheat said. Chester grinned and nodded and hunkered down again. He pulled out a pack of Raleighs-properly grown, properly cured tobacco-and lit up. After a deep drag, he nodded again. Yeah, this was what smokes were supposed to taste like.
A soldier trotted back to him and the lieutenant. “There’s a Confederate captain with a flag of truce, wants to talk to us about civilians,” he said.
“Bring him back here,” Wheat said. “We can talk.”
“Blindfold him first,” Chester added. “No point letting him see what we’ve got. That may be part of what he’s after.” The platoon commander nodded. The soldier saluted Wheat and hurried away.
“Would you like to sit in on this?” the lieutenant asked politely.
“If you don’t mind, sir,” Chester answered, as politely. The platoon leader didn’t want to let the Confederates hornswoggle him. Chester was his ace in the hole, and appreciated being invited without having to invite himself.
When the C.S. captain took off his blindfold, he proved to be about thirty, with the ribbon for the Purple Heart-a decoration that went back to George Washington, and that both sides used-on his chest. He said his name was Wilbur Pease. He didn’t seem surprised to find a first sergeant sitting in with a second lieutenant, which showed he knew how the world worked.